Essential System Administration

THE UNIX System Admin. BookFrom the book--" This book is the foundation volume for O'Reilly & Associates' system administration series...provides you with the fundamental information needed by everyone who takes care of UNIX systems...consciously avoids trying to be all things to all people; the other books in the series treat individual topics in 'complete' detail." This book gives he reader a good understanding of what goes on under the hood of a UNIX system, without getting you bogged down in the details, and also points out the diff. and sim. b/w many variants of the OS(BSD,SCO,AIX,...). You need to know a little about scripts and a few tools to get the most of the book, it's not for complete beginners, but it is very clearly written. I had been using Linux for about 9 months before buying this book, and had worked with SCO and SunOS on the job for about 5 or so years(off and on). Almost every page had an answer to a question I have asked myself over that time. "UNIX Power Tools"(1-56592-260-3)works really well as a companion book to this one. tells the ins and outs of the commands and such.

A good book for part-time system administratorsAs an user of the UNIX systems(I am a DBA). I found this book extremely valuable. It's easy to read and helped me a lot by putting pieces togather. I recommend this book for anyone who knows UNIX in general but what to get into the system administration side of it.

Linux users need this bookI am fairly new to Linux, and started by purchasing a number of O'Reilly's other titles on Linux. Some of them were very good, some of them not so good. While I have two working Linux boxes on my company network, I still had many unanswered questions about why things worked the way they did. I initially avoided this book because it was for Unix system administration, however, in a fit of desperation I purchased it and it has been *the* most useful general purpose book I have purchased for using Linux.

Certainly there are a number of specific purpose books that cover many of the topics presented here in greater detail, however, for an overview of the entire system--how it works and why it works the way it does this book is indespensable.